Cincinnati Art Museum Chooses Its Greatest Hits

Even though the Cincinnati Art Museum’s
Schmidlapp Gallery holds important Egyptian, Roman and Greek
antiquities, it seems more a conduit than a destination. That’s because
it functions as the thoroughfare between the main entrance and the
Great Hall — and the café, Cincinnati Wing and more modern collections
beyond. The display cases are no match for the determination of
visitors to get where they’re going. As a result, the whole area itself
has seemed antiquated.

But a big change is coming.

The Emma Louise Schmidlapp Gallery as we
know it essentially will end right after July 4. And after an extensive
renovation of a few months, it will reemerge with a new purpose — as
the home of Cincinnati Art Museum’s Greatest Hits. (Many of the
antiquities will move to the second floor.)

That’s not the official name for what’s
happening, but it does describe what CAM Director Aaron Betsky is
trying to do with the space. It will be dramatically designed to hold
12-18 displays of the museum’s most iconic masterworks from all
collections.

Thus it will be made into a
crowd-pleasing destination, a place to see — for instance — Matisse’s
“Romanian Blouse,” Gainsborough’s “Ann Ford (Later Mrs. Philip
Thicknesse),” a Warhol painting of a soup can (a promised bequest) and
Frank Duveneck’s “The Whistling Boy.”

The notion of a greatest-hits collection
sounds awfully pop for a fine-arts institution.

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Art museums
traditionally group their objects by separate collections, and within
those collections by eras or genre.

But Betsky seems worried that art
museums also traditionally use big traveling shows, rather than
permanent collections, to attract visitors. Indeed, an awful lot of a
permanent collection winds up in seemingly permanent storage. And with
the Great Recession changing institutional thinking (and financial
resources) for such shows, now’s a good time to try new approaches to
promote what the museum already has.

Besides the Schmidlapp experiment, the
museum come fall is turning what had been its largest space for
temporary exhibits into an area where lots of objects from all
departments will be displayed in a dense manner, including the relics
that Nelson Glueck excavated in the ancient Middle Eastern city of
Petra. The museum is treating this new installation as a show called The Collections: 6,000 Years of Art, but it will be up for a few years at least.

Other museums have tried to take
specific objects out of context and spotlight them as “curator’s
choices,” “objects of the week,” etc. It’s a practice seemingly
tailor-made for a museum website — the Met, for instance, has an
“Artwork of the Day” feature. (CAM doesn’t have anything like this.)

“We’ve found that when other
institutions do focused presentations, that’s been very popular,”
Betsky explains. “We’ve found that when we have just six great
paintings facing each other, like with Gainsborough (last year’s
award-winning Thomas Gainsborough and the Modern Woman), people
appreciate that. So this is an experiment to see if we can create
something that’s a true introduction to the art museum.

“And also, to see if it can capture
people who might come strolling in and go wandering. If we give them
this introduction and then say where they can see more, that will help
lead them through the museum more easily.”

On the other hand, if someone coming to
the museum solely for the café comes across the Matisse and stops to
admire it for a minute, that’s OK, too.

“We want to allow that to happen — the
ability to have a relationship with art in different durations and
intensities,” Betsky says.